You get to keep only enough to maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, the rest of it has to go towards improving the world in some way.
Edit: Given the previous rules that you must maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, would you rather choose to opt out and not have the money at all?
Pay for drone strikes on all the world’s dictators.
Step 1) Pay my rent for the next 10 years. Freaking out about it month to month is shredding years off of my life span. Also buy a new hard drive because I ran out of space for memes earlier today…
Step 2) Go to the grocery store and get a shitload of groceries, distilled water and cat food so that isn’t a concern for a long time. I can not eat. The cat? Not so much.
Step 3) At the grocery store, buy every single gift card they have. I mean all of them, not just the ones on the shelves. I’d go to the manager and say to get someone for me and me alone. Open a till and go through every box of every gift card, activate them all and sell all of them to me. ALL OF THEM.
Step 4) Go to every food bank in my city and give them every gift card as well as a massive cash donation. Some of the gift cards are for the staff. Otherwise 30% goes to various purchases that will help if they wanna keep the cash for a while. The other 70% gets put in with stuff that people pick up.
Step 5) Find every charity in my local area and pay them out. Reach their goals and then some.
Step 6) Make an agreement with the city to fund an ENTIRE overhaul of the transit system. My city isn’t very big but the transit here is horrific. City won’t make moves on it because cost of shifting it around will mess with the budget. So, I pay for it and over the course of a very long time, I take an incredibly small amount of any money gained from transit over the amount they made prior to overhaul. That money does not go to me but instead back into those local charities.
Step 7) Open my own vet clinic that has pricing based off of income. It’d be about the same prices as any other vets in the area overall, but if you make below a certain amount then the price drops. Keeps dropping based on how much you make. So much so that if you are homeless (as I used to be) with no income at all, you can have your furry friend treated at no charge. Hire someone who is exceptionally good at destroying competition and have them do absolutely everything in their power to obliterate any other vet clinics in the area. Absolutely fucking destroy them until they can no longer function because they simply do not have enough patients. Only those with no other option than to go to them because of travel distance. When they are utterly desperate and about to be foreclosed on, give them a generous payout as well as a hiring offer. Convert their location into another branch of my own with the same low income stipulations. No one deserves to be worried about their friend simply because they cannot afford it.
Step 8) Hire a bunch of Star Trek actors to come to Newfoundland for the biggest Trek convention ever, ideally by having the Star Trek cruise set off from there after a big blowout. Brings in a ton of tourism from nerds with disposable income and as we have some pretty exceptional views you don’t get anywhere else, we can cross over the tourism WITH the Trek. Make a big festival saying it’s a new planet or something. This is 100% just personal love but it can help the island too so why not?
Step 9) Invest in small-scale renewables and set up programs to help lower-income people lower their electricity costs (heating in my area is all electric so the prices are fucking absurd in winter). Have solar panels or whatever else hooked up with peoples homes and have the programs set to help mantain them at a minimal cost, ideally at least 30% lower than current electricity costs. That’s about $400 a year saved.
Step 10) Make some deal with the provincial government to get the moose fences set up faster. It’s a local thing.
Step 11) ALL REMAINING MONEY is to be invested in trains on the island. Absolutely none exist at the moment. We shut down the railway in Newfoundland in the 80s or 90s. First off, I’m autistic and love trains. Second, trains would make travel around this island insanely fucking easy. Requires more upkeep with the weather but as it stands the road system is awful, it takes too long to transport anything anywhere and we only have one bus route that crosses the island. It sucks and is a miserable experience. Set up a train hub at Port-Aux-Basques with spidering networks that go out to the various hotspots on the island.
Edit: Lmao the downvotes are hysterical
Move to an undisclosed remote location and start posting massive crypto bounties on the heads of the shittiest people in the world. Like, $100M a pop. Pay a digital sweatshop to spam social media with AI generated posts and memes about it until the whole world is aware. Then wait. See if anyone is able to collect.
I set up a for profit corporation whose stated goal is to make the world a better play. I donate all the money to that corporation.
As the sole owner, I now have 5 billion dollars so I change the mission to something else because I don’t have time to deal with the poors who did work as hard as me to become this successful.
Invest it, assuming 5% return, spend the interest money of 250 million per year on feeding the hungry, educating kids, and helping animals. Somewhere along the way, buy a couple of beers for myself.
I would donate the vast majority to education in the rest of homelessness
Buy the US House and Senate.
$5 B / 435 = 11,494,252 per person. Sounds do-able. Shit, Bob Menendez sold out for $480,000. 11 mil. would go a LOOONG way.
Expand food banks and shelters. Then donate water to places that need it.
This completely. You cant end capitalism with that kind of money, but you can provide cheap or free alternatives to basic needs to force the price-gouging vendors to actually compete for once and align their businesses better with the consumer.
Idk, whatever I can come up with would probably have massive unintended negative consequences.
Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.
(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)
The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)
I always wanted to see if I could ‘fix’ the Berkley Pit mine. It’s a superfund site with some of the most acidic water in the world. It was a cooper mine for decade that went bust. When the owners walked away, it started filling up with rain water. But, because of the way mines work, that water became VERY acidic. So now there’s this lake of acid out in Montana that no one wants to deal with.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit
Inter-mountain Histories: https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/376
ChemAnalyst News - Pit might have rare earth minerals: https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/montana-toxic-legacy-could-become-america-rare-earth-savior-36626
Robots that sow kelp and kill zombie urchins
A 100 bed (or so, idk what number it would actually come out to) hostel / shelter / halfway house for chronically institutionalized people who don’t know how to function in normal transitional housing. Instead of a larger number of beds they might also be split into multiple smaller buildings.
Each unit would have one small room with
- a twin bed
- a closet with a storage compartment on the bottom that takes a standard lock
- a desk
- a few of those bars on the wall you can slide posters and papers into to hang
- a single-unit sink-toilet-shower stall with groutless faux tile and a detachable shower head (so that to clean it you just cover it in bleach and use the showerhead to hose it down).
- an electric kettle
- WiFi
- a locking door that the staff have a copy of the key to but have received specialized education on renters rights and education on what specifically constitutes a safety concern.
Public facilities include:
- cafeteria that provides 3 hot meals as well as a vending machine with reconstitutable MRE style meals that can be made with hot water
- laundry
- library / public access computers
- meeting rooms that are reservable but also host supportive and educational group therapies
- a large public chalkboard wall with 7 sections that are wiped down one at a time in sequence throughout the week with additional discretion of the staff to erase hatespeech
- a non-denominational / non-religion-specific “chapel” that any religious leader may rent for one hour a week in exchange for some minimum monetary donation. They also receive a listing on an updatable placard posted just outside or near the entrance on the inside listing their contributions publicly in addition to being listed on the monthly accounting posting. It is designed so that vestments can be interchangeably hung and they may also rent a closet to store them in.
Residents do pay rent but it’s only enough to keep the facility running and the accounting books are publicly available on a monthly basis. If the model does well enough and receives enough outside support, rent may be a symbolic amount like $5-10 just to legally maintain the facility as a transitional public service as opposed to a long term housing solution (although that would be another great thing to donate this money to, but my personal focus would be the people that would struggle to function in that environment without some sort of actual rehabilitation).
They can get a discount by performing tasks to run, clean, and maintain the facilities including both the public areas and turning over rooms between residents or maintaining the rooms of disabled residents (while those residents are elsewhere for the day). Their names are not listed on the public books, just the number of people contributing in this manner. Any money they make for tasks performed outside the facility is theirs to keep.
There are no drug tests but no drugs (or weapons) are allowed on the premises. Any paid staff are background checked and any 24-hr safety staff (so not kitchen / EVS) who do not already have a license or advanced degree in health and human services receive somewhere between a 2-week to 1-month 8hr per day classroom education on human rights, nonviolent crisis deescalation, CPR, safety and sanitation, and policy training on how to assess and what to do if they suspect drugs or weapons have been brought on the premises (probably some other stuff too but idk. I’d make the class longer if I thought it would be financially possible / likely to get enough people to attend). Would also probably help to have 1 hour of monthly continuing education on a bunch of those topics but also to help them contextualize their experiences with this population.
The floors are sex segregated with the exception of one floor (or a smaller proportion) that is co-ed and allows persons of any gender presentation provided they have no history of sex or gender targeted charges.
If I think of anything else I’ll add it, but these are my thoughts having worked with this population and wishing there were more services focused on helping them reenter society.
Also tbph I’d probably actually live there myself, eat in the cafeteria, have a weekly movie night in one of the public meeting rooms, etc, the only thing I’d be missing is a workshop, but I could do with maybe a slightly larger permanent suite in the basement or on the roof or something. The tradeoff would be dealing with the bullshit that would necessarily arise on a 24/7 basis, LOL. I might also want a bigger bed if my husband wanted to live there with me, which he might because his 5b idea is almost definitely a free or low cost cafeteria (I’m a nurse, he’s a cook) but he’s also much more misanthropic than me and might want more privacy / emotional distance.
In the US, so free health insurance for those making under 100k for 6 months (or likely less - whenever the money runs out). Maybe that would give enough people a taste of universal healthcare that they would start voting for policies that get us closer to that.
I would fund community-led projects that align with my values such as:
- mutual aid collectives
- community-run gardens, libraries, and clinics
- labor and tenant unions / cooperatives
- intentional communities
- food pantries / soup kitchens
- parks and other 3rd spaces
- art collectives
- sustainability initiatives (rooftop solar, heat pumps, microgrids, rewilding, permaculture / indigenous farming practices, etc.)
- public multimodal transportation infrastructure
My focus would be on empowering people to help each other even after the money runs out.